I originally used the automatic bill pay in attempt to automate my finances and get them back on track. There was one incident where I was charged a NSF fee for not having enough funds to covers 2 bills ($58). Ok I get that and took the bullet. However, bill pay allows whoever you submitted the funds to either re-present the e-check AGAIN or will go ahead and pay the bill and try to pull the funds again. This means that if you don't have the funds in 1-2 business days you will be charged ANOTHER $29 per transaction. THIS IS A RIDICULOUS HASSLE, not a convenient feature. So now it’s up to $106 of NSF. At most banking institutions, if a check is no good it’s no good. The company you're trying to pay just charges you a NSF fee on your account with them. In addition, why would you go ahead and pay a large bill on my behalf fully aware that the funds are not in my account without even confirming with me if that is what I needed/desired? Furthermore, how would it make sense that USAA would expect you to have the funds placed in there to cover it in 1-2 business days if it wasn’t there in the first place?! Even if I had it magically and transferred it from a different bank, it would have taken 3-5 business days for most institutions! That being said I called USAA and they were initially helpful and reversed the 2nd set of NSF, and I immediately took those two bills from auto pay to avoid that issue again. Fast forward. I manually paid two bills (different from last time), and from my last experience I wanted to avoid auto bill pay in order to control my finances better. Somehow, I missed that those bills I manually paid still had auto bill pays scheduled. By the way, USAA sends me all kinds of notifications to my email and somehow doesn’t have a feature to remind you that you have a payment scheduled with bill pay? That makes no sense. I ended up sending a second payment for those same bills that I already manually paid. I just so happened to check my account that I realized that payments had been sent off and the status said completed. So I immediately called the same day and explained the situation to the representative. His response was there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Even one the bills being the USAA credit card, he was unable to do anything until everything processed. Nothing was done. Ok I understood as I used to work at a financial institution and dealt with similar electronic ACH processing. So after I was of course charged ($58) for those two transactions, I called explained the situation to another representative as well as the double NSF fiasco from my previous experience. I was told AGAIN there’s nothing they could to stop the 2nd set of NSF I knew was coming my way, and since I had used up my 3 NSF reversal limit per year I wouldn’t be getting my funds back this time. I even called the two companies to ask them to not present those e-checks because I paid already, and their response is that because it’s an e-check it goes directly to their institution. Of course it does, and yes I was charged another $58 in NSF for bills I had PAID already! I blame this on two things wrong with the Auto Bill Pay Feature. A) You don’t get email of scheduled payments and there’s no notification window of when you have scheduled bills coming up on the inbox alerts & action box of the web version. Yes, there is a Pay Bills and Transfer Funds tile but that’s not practical especially for mobile users like myself, and you have to add that tile yourself. B) They are called non-sufficient funds for a reason. Having that clause that allows other institutions to charges us a 2nd time for the same e-check is taking money out of peoples’ accounts and hurting our finances. That should be a third-party issue in which the third-party charges or notified us that the payment didn’t go through. Why would you pay a bill and not even confirm if that’s what I needed?! There was zero time to intervene on my side!!! Think about it. From a simple human error, you all have profited $106 from two bills I initially ALREADY paid, one of them being your own USAA credit card. And the only answer that I got from TWO of your representatives was that there was nothing you could do to help. Do you even understand or care? I’ve been with you all for five years because of the good service, but this is repulsive that you treat people who are trying to get their finances on the straight path like this.
